


Applesauce Gore

by deadthing



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 02:35:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1802203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadthing/pseuds/deadthing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'I no longer had anything resembling pupils. The meats of my eyes had filled in with gushing gore, hemocyanin burnt instantly scarlet by the glare, or so I'm told, as it pooled beneath my corneas.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Applesauce Gore

There was that stickiness waking up as if I'd cried in my sleep and when I choked on my first wakened breath, I could not tell if my eyes were open. My hand came to my face. Fingers cold, ten of them, and crust sealing shut my left eye. I scraped a blunt fingernail into my tear duct and came away with something wet. I'd realized after a long while that humidity didn't have a smell. It had a feel on the sensitive skin of the nose, and it hung heavy on the chest and in the lungs. I breathed deeply. A dull swell of hot teal coiled and wafted like smoke in my nostrils. It was thick in the evening, when it was quiet and temperate. Nothing to smell but my breath. Nothing to feel but it, too.  
Two hands on the rim of the 'coon, hoisting myself up, and then came the low buzz that I had yet to ever pinpoint. It was just the faintest bit of gunmetal grey, felt in my auricular sponge clots, familiar though far away. The floor was unfinished and probably always would be. It was cold as all fuck, starkly juxtaposing the stale, sweating air hanging like a fog in the block. I balanced carefully on the balls of slimy feet, pressing as little naked surface area to the floor as possible. The slapping wet sounds of my trudge to the trap produced a murky, dark color. The creak of the door was chartreuse and the tap rang deep purple, poured down, slapping magenta onto cracked porcelain.  
The lukewarm splash against my soft skin and hair conjured a million shades of pink and smelled white of calcium. It trickled down my sternum and I felt myself shiver twitchingly. I ran my palms under the spray, and dragged my fingers roughly through short hair. I stood only long enough to rinse the sopor out, then turned the tap off and leaned, back flush against the tile wall, cold and wet with mist and condensation. A muffled siren rang vermillion from outside.  
I needed red.  
"Candy. Carcass. Kerosene. Cavalreaper." Getting warmer. "Kismesis. Cull, cull, cull. Cadmium." Good. "Cadmium. Cad mi um. Cad. Mi. Um." Swills of the same washed down my throat. "Karkat. VrisKa. Vriska-ka-ka-ka." Electric neon flashed in my mind's eye. Alternia was radium. I licked my lips.

Eight-thirty found me fully clothed and pushing through the glass revolving door. The hive stem was upscale. The neighborhood was not. CIPs steered clear of Barium Park. The bay, down the straightaway leading from midring deep into derelict sprawl, was bleak and churned grey with vile chemical waste. Project housing and red neighborhoods crumbled into oblivion along the left bank. Tall, yellow and midblood skyscrapers obscured dusk around the rim of the inlet. Or so I'd read in city guides. I'd never actually seen the place in which I lived. At nine sweeps I'd relocated for work, as a criminal investerrigator and intelligence agent. Not nearly as glamorous as legislacerator, but I was working up. I'd had my accident at five. I no longer had anything resembling pupils. The meats of my eyes had filled in with gushing gore, hemocyanin burnt instantly scarlet by the glare, or so I'm told, as it pooled beneath my corneas. "Corneas." What a tasty word.  
Habitually, I swept my cane over the cracks and grooves in the sidewalk ahead of me. I barely needed it as a support anymore. I could hear and smell a person ten feet away. A yellowblood stepped into my range. Walked quickly to shift the night air and shouldered roughly past me. Rude. The wind on my face blew dampness into my hair, the top oily layer of the bay. As I walked I counted. Kept track of the amount of times I stepped onto or off of a curb. Three blocks from my hive was the entrance to the underground. I descended the steps alongside a blur of murky green.  
"Evening," Spinach muttered. I nodded curtly. 

I got off in three stops. It was easier to judge distance in the sprawl. The overpass and the narrow alleyways between decrepit buildings each had distinct echoes underfoot. Block ACs chugged and lurched. I felt a drip and heard the yellow clang of machinery. 'White noise' was a gross misnomer; the sum of traffic and wind and the low mechanical buzzing that permeated every city street and every crooked alleyway, totaled up a deep, dark grey, and tasted an awful lot like blood and piss.  
The streets straightened out. The sounds changed. The buzz was nearly black here, and the sounds and smells of life and engines reignited. Argon stunk in the air, it's burnt, electric violet swimming in my snot barrels alongside carbon-based clouds of yellow. Fifty shades of it. The color of energy. Stinking swarms of people pushed through my ten-foot bubble. Body heat and hot breath, husks of crustaceans, sweat sour purple. The atmosphere hung low over tenth sect.  
I let my fingers graze the brick. There were Braille plaques crudely welded outside the stems here. Too many mustard bloods had blown their oculars clean out of their skulls with sheer psychic force, drones didn't even bother to cull the crusties anymore. They could still work digital infrastructure, and hack for the imperials. Most had shit vision to begin with. 

Sollux Captor had a dark ocher scent to match his blood, and two hands around his waist could nearly touch claw to claw. I had to buzz in twice before he called the doorman, who huffed in surprise at my blue raspberry windbreaker. I used my cane inside. The building was less familiar to me than the hostel Sollux had lived in with Aradia for two sweeps in twelfth sect. It had been a perigee since her death and it was a shame he had yet to get over it. But he had moved on. And up. I suspected way up, because the pay he was coming up with from hacking for the up-tops would probably see him in a cozy seventh sect loft by this time next sweep.  
I stopped at the humming vending machine outside his apartment, fished out two ceagers and an imperial. I pressed them in and took a lucky guess with the buttons. The thing that clanked out was noxiously sweet and bright lime green. I knocked twice.  
Something startlingly deep magenta cracked open the door and made a slapping sound of a heft satchel strap being adjusted.  
"Forgive me for being so rude," she whispered, "but Sollux told me you can't see. Is that correct?" There was something odd about the way she said 'see'. It wasn't mocking, but it made me uncomfortable. I lifted my specs. "Do you need me to help you in?" That was a cute little coverup, but I'd already smelled the metallic and strawberry-lemonade.  
I entered to Sollux, presumably sprawled naked on the couch. I heard shuffling and the light-blue scuff of skin against cushions.  
"Hey, T-Z," Sollux lisped. "Remember Feferi?"  
Right. That was Strawberry's name. "Glub glub?" I asked. Her weight shifted.  
"Well as you can smell, F-F's got means to hook you up with quite a few more bottles of your nasty green pisswater. Twelve-million bottles a year, if you play along."  
This was a job offer. The figures sounded quit similar to the yearly haul of a top legislacerator. Feferi was pulling on clothes. The next time she spoke, her speech was muffled.  
"Let me buy you lunch," she said. "We'll talk then, I'm so hungry."  
She fumbled with keys, and Sollux breathed next to me.  
"I found AG," he whispered, the two sharp consonants cutting cerulean gashes into my mind's eye.  
"Arachnid's, arachnid's, arachnid's grip."

**Author's Note:**

> i'm writing this fic for my own pleasure, but its popularity will determine my future fanfiction career, as I lack confidence in my writing ability. likewise, feedback is valued immensely.


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